Remote inter-personal real-time two-way communication (IRTC) became possible with the invention of the telephone over 100 years ago. Since then, due to technological progress, other forms of IRTC became possible. Currently, the most popular forms of IRTC include wireline and wireless telephony, audio/video conferencing, instant messaging, application sharing, desktop display sharing, whiteboard sharing, networked gaming and co-browsing. While different forms of the IRTC penetrated different markets, it is fair to say that generally telephony is pervasive in most business and personal activities while all the other forms of IRTC have a significantly smaller market penetration than telephony.
While telephony is currently the most ubiquitous and easy to use form of IRTC, end users would benefit by being able to augment a telephone conversation with other forms of IRTC. For example, during a phone conversation with a manager, a sales rep may want to jointly review and modify slides which will be presented at an upcoming client meeting. In another example, while a residential PC user talks to a software troubleshooting service representative, the user may want to add desktop sharing to the phone call in progress. In yet another example, two friends may want to jointly step through their vacation pictures while talking on the phone about recent vacations.
In all of these scenarios, communicating parties start with a simple phone call and then, as appropriate, add other forms of IRTC. As noted, currently the most common form of inter-personal real-time two-way communication is a wireline/wireless phone conversation where telephone parties use one of the following devices: a POTS phone, a PBX/CENTREX phone or a mobile phone. Other forms of IRTC, such as video conferencing, instant messaging, PC-based application sharing, desktop display sharing, whiteboard sharing, networked gaming and co-browsing, are becoming increasingly popular, but require the use of appropriate end-user devices, e.g. networked PCs, PDA's, notepads or advanced mobile phones.
One problem is that most IRTC interactions start with a regular phone call and there is no easy way to add other forms of IRTC to the phone call in progress. For example, in the scenario where a sales rep calls a manager to chat about an upcoming customer meeting and during the conversation the two decide to jointly review/update presentation slides, both of the parties must have access to networked PCs in order to collaborate on the presentation. However, in a typical environment it is not easy to establish joint editing of slides. Rather, this type of collaboration is generally done completely independently from the phone call in progress. The two collaboration participants must agree on using the same collaboration application, and then establish the collaboration session, typically using a completely separate addressing schema and collaboration session establishment signaling. The complexity associated with this operation is enough to discourage all but the most technically inclined end users.
In another example, similar difficulties arise when two friends while talking on the phone about their recent vacations would like to jointly view sets of vacation pictures. In a still further example, a house seller and real estate attorney lawyer having a phone conversation about the results of a home inspection decide to jointly prepare a response to the buyer's long list of repair requests. As with the above examples, there is no easy way to add collaborative document viewing and editing.
In particular, upon user A and user B agreeing to enhance the phone call, they must also agree on which software product will be used to enhance the phone call. This decision may require a technical savvy of network, firewall/NAT infrastructure that affects many of the existing software products. Some of the known choices include T.120 clients such as NetMeeting, IM products such as Yahoo! Windows Messenger, etc., and existing web conferencing solutions such as DCL Meeting Server, WebEx, etc.
To utilize these software products, users must have access to the software, which may require purchasing the software, software installation and establishing a billing agreement between the users and the service provider. Then the collaboration session must be established. This is accomplished by setting up the enhanced session manually using tools provided by the corresponding product, exchanging the information required to connect to the session and manually entering the information in the corresponding application. Such information may include IP addresses (NetMeeting or other T.120 clients), subscription IDs (IM products), and Conference Server URL with tokens such as conference key, and password (web conferencing solutions).
Exchanging the information necessary for entering the collaboration may further entail the web conference providers sending the information by e-mail distribution. While this procedure is viable for conferences scheduled in advance, this approach lacks real time characteristics required for ad-hoc spontaneous call enhancement.
Many of the current methods of enhancing the phone call are cumbersome and are not practical unless both users already subscribe to the same service and have already installed the corresponding software. Even if software installation and service subscription are not issues, the collaboration setup process involves many manual steps that diminish both usefulness and accessibility.
The manual process requires, at minimum, the users to perform session signaling twice: first using phones and phone numbers, then using PC based collaboration application and it's proprietary session signaling and addressing. However simple the application signaling is, it requires effort and needs to be learned by the users.
Therefore, there remains a need in the art for improvements in the technology of enhanced phone-based collaboration.